When D.H. Lawrence arrived in Australia on 4 May 1922, he was so ignorant of the country's actual conditions that he was, as David Game observes in his fine new book, expecting to arrive 'in late spring and find apple blossom'. Game's extensively researched and informative monograph recounts ways in which Australia operated for Lawrence mainly as a utopian idea, a potential site for 'regenerative potential' and thus 'an alternative to his earlier hopes for America'. There has been much academic consideration of Lawrence's intellectual investments in the United States, interests that manifest themselves most clearly in his landmark Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), but not nearly so much on the author's engagements with Australia. In this sense, the work of Game, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, represents a welcome intervention. His book makes the cogent case that the significance of Australia to Lawrence's aesthetic vision has generally been under-estimated.